The poster for RaquelWelch's second film,One Million Years B.C., became the top pin-up of the late 1960s, and Welch — a divorced mom of two who had been a cocktail waitress just a few months earlier — found herself in the odd position of being an old-fashioned sex goddess in the age of flower children and feminism. With her unprecedentedly athletic curves, Welch was willing to exploit her natural gifts to some extent, but was adamant about not doing full nudity. Her stubbornness about maintaining control over the representation of her body made her unpopular in an industry which wasn’t interested in anything about her but her body; at the same time, Welch was disdained by contemporary feminists for her sexualized image, even though in several of her films, Welch set the prototype for the modern day action heroine. Fed up at age 40, Welch sued a major Hollywood studio for conspiracy to defame her and end her career.

Show Notes!

When I first recorded this episode, for some reason I kept referring to One Million Years B.C. as One Billion Years B.C. I have no idea why — I wrote it correctly in my script for the show, but somehow was unable to either read it correctly, or notice that I was reading it incorrectly until I started editing the episode. I went back and rerecorded a few lines; if I missed any of the old “Billions,” I apologize.

This was a deep research week. In addition to Welch’s own, somewhat disappointing book, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, I consulted many, many magazine and newspaper articles, some of which I found only on microfiche, which is not always well labelled. These were the key sources, linked where possible: